


we're all damned here

by magisterequitum



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, S4 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 18:33:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/pseuds/magisterequitum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She overheard Stefan talking about what he did, heard Damon utter "Well, good for you, keeping the Original Bitch down and out", and really it wasn't a choice at all after that.</p><p>For all the bluster that they try to put on, they weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were. Certainly not smarter than her. It wasn't hard to realize that a group of hybrids, when Klaus was so desperate to keep the remaining ones he had near, could only mean one thing: guard dogs.</p><p>It's maybe the most reckless thing she'd done since turning, and maybe she got luck on her side because she slipped into the mansion's grounds easily enough, walks across dewy grass to the woods out back where there's a smaller building. Stefan really knew how to pick the hiding places; or not.</p><p>(or fic where Elena wakes up Rebekah and chooses her as her new ally)</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're all damned here

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this before the reveal of the sire bond, so that doesn't come into play here at all. 
> 
> (possibly set up for a sequel)

She overheard Stefan talking about what he did, heard Damon utter "Well, good for you, keeping the Original Bitch down and out", and really it wasn't a choice at all after that.

For all the bluster that they try to put on, they weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were. Certainly not smarter than her. It wasn't hard to realize that a group of hybrids, when Klaus was so desperate to keep the remaining ones he had near, could only mean one thing: guard dogs.

It's maybe the most reckless thing she'd done since turning, and maybe she got luck on her side because she slipped into the mansion's grounds easily enough, walks across dewy grass to the woods out back where there's a smaller building. Stefan really knew how to pick the hiding places; or not.

The coffin groaned when she cracked the lid. Her fingers rest on the paneled wood of the top. She watched for how long she's not sure, taking in the gray skin that was made even more dull against the white satin she laid on. It wasn't right. She reached down and moved the hair that clung to skin that once was vibrant with color, lets her fingers slide down the slope of a cheekbone.

Elena jerked the dagger free and threw it away from her. The metal clanged and clattered before it fell to rest in the corner.

She didn't stay. She didn't leave any blood bags. She just went as quietly as she'd came.

 

 

 

A hand curved around her throat and the back of the bleachers suddenly became her face's new best friend. She took a few breaths, clawing desperately, and then realized she didn't actually need air to breathe. There's a flash of blonde hair before her body's spun around, the hand removed, and part of her spine might indeed crack against the metal bleachers before she was shoved backwards.

"Nice to see you too, Rebekah." Elena eyed the hand that had just a second ago been wrapped around her neck, and very pointedly did not reach up to rub the soreness in her neck.

Rebekah's eyes were narrowed and her jaw tight as she glared at her. "Why did you do it?"

"Do what?" Elena fired back, even though she knew what she's asking for.

Taking a step towards her, a flurry of movement, Rebekah hissed, "Let me out. Why did you undagger me?"

She's grateful that no one else was around on the practice field, that they're shielded from any potential eyes. The last thing she needed was for anyone to see two vampires fighting on school grounds, which with how Rebekah was eyeing her looked to be their next step.

Elena frowned, her lips slipping downward on one side. She hadn't left behind any clues, she'd made sure of that. "How did you know it was me?"

Rebekah sniffed, exhaling sharply between her nose, an eyebrow rising as she gave her a once over look from her head to her toes. "I could smell you when I woke up."

Her frown deepened for a moment, and she guessed that was possible. She hadn't really tested her nose out on people all that much. She'd been doing everything she could just to eat and keep blood down, no time to explore her extra senses now. Not that she had anyone she really wanted to be around to show her currently either. People were grating lately.

"The lovely aroma of cheap clothes and patheticness that could only be Elena Gilbert," Rebekah continued, her mouth a cruel sneer.

"Oh thanks, Rebekah." Elena tilted her head with her next statement, conveying across all of her sarcasm. "A simple thank you would be just fine. You're welcome."

The other girl stepped back as if Elena had actually hit her. Her face didn't go flat and shuttered so much as it froze in an openness of shock, inconceivable of taking what Elena had just said.

Elena offered her a bare smile. Then, the killing blow while she had her here. "I forgive you."

Rebekah didn't stop her when she edged past her and left.

 

 

 

A hand smacked down onto the table, just in front of her AP biology textbook, not quite hitting the pages but making them flutter from the air displacement.

Elena looked up from her notebook, gripping her pencil tight in her hand. "Rebekah," she said slowly in acknowledgment of the hand's owner.

Sliding her hand along the table, Rebekah moved with it to slide into the other side of the booth. No one else in the Grill had looked over.

"I didn't ask for your forgiveness."

She blinked and tapped the pencil against her book. "No, you didn't."

Rebekah narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. "So why do you think I want it or care for it?"

Shrugging, she exhaled. "Maybe it was for me too. It doesn't matter, does it? You say you don't want it, but I gave it. So who cares?"

Blue eyes appraised her from across the table, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say something, maybe something about she didn't understand her at all, Elena could see it. As it stood, it never came because the door to the Grill opened then and Rebekah's attention was diverted to the person walking in. She looked over her shoulder to see who it was. Briefly, the thought flitted through her mind of wondering if she'd gotten Rebekah into trouble by undaggering her. Physically fine, but maybe not emotionally.

Elena turned away from Klaus's back, her next statement falling out of her mouth before she could stop it. "You know, you don't have to let him treat you like that. Or let him get to you."

Rebekah's gaze snapped back to her, irritation in her face and voice. "And what makes you think you know anything our relationship? About me at all?"

Shrugging again, she stretched her mouth into a grimace. "Maybe I don't. But I do know about people wanting you to be something you're not. About you not being good enough. I've got plenty of that lately."

A few moments passed and still they sat in the booth. An awkward silence descended and Elena wondered if Rebekah was too proud to leave even if she might have wanted to. Or if she was stuck in her seat because she didn't want to be the one to give an inch in whatever silent communication war her and Klaus were engaged in currently.

"You know," Elena started to say, slowly her mouth forming the words. "The best way to piss him off is to show him you don't care. If you wanted to stay here at the table, show him you're fine, I wouldn't say anything."

Rebekah bit her bottom lip. For a moment she didn't look anything more than a regular girl. She wasn't the one who'd killed her, who made her this way. A selfish part of Elena wanted to lash out and blame her, to say that all of her problems lately were because Rebekah had killed her and set her out to be this thing that everyone hated and was dissatisfied with. She let those thoughts go. They'd change nothing and she'd already forgiven her.

Instead, she gave a little laugh and wiggled her pencil. "I promise not to try and stab you."

"As if you could," Rebekah scoffed but she settled further back against the booth.

 

 

 

Elena turned away from Caroline, peering into her locker as if her textbooks could help her get out of this situation. "Look, Care, I really don't want to talk about this right now."

"Elena," her name was a fierce command that nearly made her cringe. "Why not talk about-"

The smell of gardenias came before the arrival of its owner, and a sickly sweet voice sounded from behind the locker door. "I think Elena told you to leave her alone, Caroline."

"That's not what she said."

"Well I am for her since she's gone mute but clearly doesn't want you here. So get lost." This was said with less cheer and far more menace.

After she was sure it was now only two of them, Elena closed her locker and sighed at Rebekah. "You shouldn't have done that."

Rebekah raised an eyebrow and looked up from where she was picking a hangnail from her thumb. "I didn't see you say anything to the contrary."

Another sigh, more like an exhale, and she had to concede that. "Okay, maybe so, but I'm going to be in even more trouble now."

Elena received a look for that and Rebekah then turned so she was sideways, no longer standing with her back against the lockers. "Did you really want to listen to her tell you about Stefan some more? Or about this Miss Mystic Falls thing tomorrow?"

She looked upward and then gave her head a little shake. "Okay, point given."

"I thought about what you said," Rebekah was already moving away, down the hall towards the classrooms. "I owe you one."

If she received a text message during history that said 'since when are you and Rebekah bffs' she didn't respond.

 

 

 

She knocked on the door because it was polite and she wasn't quite sure how this was going to go over. While she stood on the porch she hoped she didn't have to wait too long, less her mind remind her how potentially stupid this was; but then she remembered that it wasn't like Rebekah and Klaus were actually speaking currently. Her ears picked up the noises of the wind in the trees and the deer moving from a mile away and the owl gliding through the night. She was just now getting used to sorting out all of her senses and how much more she could do to them and use them now that she was a vampire. Her ears could hear too the movement inside the house.

The white door swung open, followed by a grouchy, "What are you doing here?"

Elena nearly laughed, nearly giggled, at seeing the pink slippers on Rebekah's feet. She wisely swallowed it. "Um," she licked her lips, gathering her thoughts again. "You said you owed me one. I don't have a place to stay."

"And you thought I would let you stay here?"

"You owe me one," she repeated. She gripped the strap of her duffle bag tighter. She still wore her Miss Mystic Falls dress from earlier in the day. "My brother wants to kill me now."

"Join the club," Rebekah deadpanned. Even if it wasn't entirely true, the sentiment behind it wasn't lost.

Elena gave her a wry smile despite her attempt to keep her face neutral. "Everybody else keeps wanting things from me. Didn't you tell me to do the opposite?"

Rebekah shook her head and in the night's light her hair shone bone white. "No, I think that was you telling me that."

They stood there, Elena on the brick steps and Rebekah in the doorway, till finally Rebekah turned around, calling over her shoulder, "Well are you coming or not?"

 

 

 

"Pick whatever room you want."

Elena followed her up the stairs, ready to be able to strip herself from the itchy lace of her dress and clean her face from her makeup and sweat from the day. She reached for a doorknob.

"Oh not that one. That one was the parents. Poor things."

She took her hand off and decided she didn't even want to know.

 

 

 

"We should drink."

Elena called out as Rebekah walked through the hallway, clearly meaning to carry on somewhere else but stopping at her words. She waved the bottle of bourbon at her, listening to the liquor slosh inside the glass. They weren't really roommates, Rebekah and she. Or maybe they were. Back when they'd still talked about college dreams and ideas Caroline had once made Elena promise that if they went to the same school, she'd be her roommate so that Caroline didn't get stuck with some stranger that never talked to her or did anything with her. That's what this was kind of like. They went to school, went out, but not together. They just happened to come home to the same place.

The others had tried to make her come elsewhere. She'd told them to leave her alone; actually she'd said 'so you can tell me what to do again? no thanks'. She knew Bonnie was with Jeremy, due to the fact that she was the only one she texted regularly currently. Bonnie had asked her before, "do you really know what you're doing?" and Elena could only answer, "Not really.".

"You're already drunk. I can smell you from here," Rebekah said, frowning at her from the entryway to the living room.

"Am not," she replied, but the over thirty seconds it took for her to answer ruined it. She gave the bottle another shake. "I stole it from Damon's stash."

Crossing the room to sit in a chair caddy-corner to her spot on the couch, Rebekah exhaled through her nose in concession. "He does have above average taste in liquor, about the only thing he's good at."

Elena took a deep swig from the bottle's neck before passing it over. Surprisingly, the other girl mimicked her, swallowing from the lip instead of pouring a glass. She watched her swallow, taking even more than she had..

"How are the dearest Salvatores?"

Grimacing, Elena took the bottle back, letting the harshness of the bourbon on her throat ease the annoyance at their name. "Same," she said, coughing before continuing. "Same as always."

"I do owe Stefan a visit." The way Rebekah said it sounded no where near the way she'd said she owed Elena. There was a smirk to her lips, a twist in the pink gloss of them, how her eyes promised hurt.

She opened her mouth to respond. It was on the tip of her tongue to respond, the words all there. But then the image of Rebekah in the coffin flashed across her mind, and then the way he'd said he wanted to fix her as if Elena was broken, and finally how she was living here because she couldn't live at home without fearing having to hurt Jeremy when he tried to cut her heart out in the middle of the night. She thought of how she only heard from him through Bonnie.

Rebekah eyed her, waiting for her to say something.

She raised the bottle, giving the top a little tip. "To the shitty people in our lives."

They both drank to it.

 

 

 

They stopped just being simple passing ghosts in the same house after that.

Rebekah would throw a blood bag on top of her European history notes and tell her she looked like death and needed to feed. She'd choke it down and try hard to concentrate on not throwing up while Rebekah stared her down.

Elena would come home and tear into the kitchen, pulling bowls and pans that belonged to the previous owners (she definitely did not think of who they were or what they were doing or where they were), and raiding the pantry. She'd bake and bake, remembering the times that her mother had dragged her into the kitchen to teach her how. Once she'd gotten Rebekah to join in while making gingerbread.

They drank stolen bourbon and whiskey.

They didn't talk about the men in their lives again.

 

 

 

Elena should have known that a new hunter would come to town. When had their lives ever been so easy lately; or ever, a voice that blended and sounded like her brother and Bonnie together said. She was so tired though. So very tired and she'd met with Death over and over again too many times now to muster up any type of strength to protest when the hunter's knife bit into her side.

They're not alone, she and the new guy, though, and the others pour into the woods with them.

She didn't kill him, but she did take pride in the resounding crack of breaking bone when her punch sent the man skidding away from her over frozen grass. She bared her teeth, fangs sharp and protruding, and delighted in the way her skin reknit itself.

"I'm fine," she said to the eyes that turned to her, wide green and awestruck blues. She turned away from them, not wanting the heaviness of their gazes on her. She didn't want to hear what they had to say anyway. She was figuring this out herself. She wouldn't break now.

Another vicious crack of bone sounded out and Elena turned in time to see Rebekah throwing the hunter at Klaus's feet. "There's your precious cure."

Elena didn't know which caused her to cringe more: the bones snapping as the man hit the ground or the mention of the cure; neither, both, the implications behind.

 

 

 

Later, she washed the blood from her hair and skin. Touched steady fingers over where the knife had split her open earlier.

With her hair still wet, she walked down the hall past her room and into the other at the opposite end. It was a large room. In the dark she could see white walls and a bed and various books and knickknacks. Even a vase of flowers on the dresser's top.

Rebekah said nothing when Elena hopped onto the bed to lay beside her.

"You said I could have any room I wanted," she said with a smile, a little tease to her tone.

They lay there, bodies parallel commas, Rebekah with her head flat on the pillow, Elena’s propped up by her arm and elbow. Finally, Rebekah spoke. “You know my brother will never stop for this cure to turn you back.”

The smile dropped from her face. She shrugged and pulled the comforter closer, jerking it away from where it was all stuffed under the other girl’s limbs. In the process, the movement and the solidness of Rebekah’s body caused her to move forward, to move closer. They touched now. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

 

 

In the morning they ate stale gingerbread and Elena gagged on a mug of blood while Rebekah glared at her and talked about a different brother to find. She smelled of gardenias.


End file.
